Lighting Artist Portfolio - Minecraft: Story Mode (Season One - Netflix)
Perhaps THE PROJECT that helped facilitate the end of Telltale Games, Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix was an ambitious endeavor to see how we could bring Telltale's style of story driven gaming to the massive streaming service. Early information leaks combined with poor communication between the major companies involved (Mojang, Microsoft, Netflix) led to lawsuits and the bankruptcy of Telltale Games. Of course, there were many other factors that led to Telltale's demise, but Im lead to believe this project and its communication errors was definitely a contributing factor.
Fortunately, I wasn't involved with any of the aforementioned conflicts (hence my conjecture)! I was too busy lighting the best looking version of Minecraft: Story Mode to date. When the idea was pitched, Mark Hamer (art director) and I lobbied hard for a fully dynamically lit version of the game since it was going to be compared/competing with all the other animated content on Netflix. Since the game was going to be pre-rendered into video, I had no restrictions on system performance and could load the environments with high quality shadow casters and scripted lighting events. I basically ripped out and deleted the old baked lighting and did a new interpretation with a dynamic light rig. I used the original lighting as a reference but with further attention to depth, contrast, color, and shadows.
This might be the project I was the most proud of during my time at Telltale. Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix was a project I became very passionate about and fought hard for a lot of visual improvements (among other things). Hell, we almost made it possible to save Reuben the Pig until we were told a hard "no" by Mojang once they became more involved. Interestingly enough, this project was a successful experiment for Netflix which led to them to produce other interactive movies such as Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and the interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt movie. Telltale had the right idea with Netflix as a potential partner, but circumstances did not end in its favor.
Sadly, we did move forward and put a lot of work into the DLC episodes for Season One, but the closure of Telltale (and fallout between the parties involved) means that work will forever remain unfinished for the Netflix platform (it would have been the three additional episodes). That work and data is now sitting in some hard drive somewhere, collecting dust, like thousands of other unfinished projects in the world of interactive media.
